What I’m Taking – Rapamycin

In this video series I go over all of the medications I’m taking and why. The first one is Rapamycin, which helps with anti-aging. Find out what it is, where it comes from, and why I’ve chosen to add it to my protocol.

Transcript:

[00:00:00.000] – Sam Ridgeway
How would you like to live longer? And by longer, I don’t mean just taking more breaths before you die. I mean extending both the duration and quality of your life, both of those simultaneously. Welcome to the first episode of the video series I’ve named What I’m Taking. And yes, I thought that up all by myself. In this series, I’ll explain all the medications I’m taking and why. And the first one is Rapamycin. It was originally discovered in 1972 in the soil of Easter Island, so it’s been around for quite a while. But let’s get the formalities out of the way first. What is Rapamycin? In layman’s terms, it moderates the activity of the immune system. Initially, it was employed to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients. Imagine your immune system as an overly cautious border patrol agent. Rapamycin essentially provides the proper credentials to those newly transplanted organs, allowing them to legally enter the country without a biological riot in the rest of the body. However, the dimensions of Rapamycin extend far beyond the transplantation arena, which leads us to the reason why I’m taking it, and that’s because it has potential anti-aging properties. Recent studies in mice have revealed controlled doses can extend lifespan, opening the floodgates of possibilities for combating age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and even some forms of cancer.

[00:01:26.690] – Sam Ridgeway
This isn’t mere speculation. It’s supported by a growing body of scientific evidence. In one study, Rapamycin was given to mice that were 20 months old. To put this into perspective, that’s equivalent to about 60-year-olds in a human. They did this for three months, stopped the treatment, and then observed the subjects until they died naturally. The normal lifespan of a mouse is around 30 months. However, these mice, on average, live two months longer. That’s an increase in longevity of seven per cent. But one of the mice lived to be three years, eight months old, which is the equivalent of a human reaching 140, and that’s pretty amazing. In another study, Rapamycin was shown to stabilize DNA because when DNA becomes unstable, which happens to all of us as we age, the instructions contained within that DNA strand, instructions needed to repair the body properly; they become blurry, they become unreadable. It’s like making a photocopy of a photocopy over and over and over again. The further that copy gets from the original photo, the less chance the information will be read and interpreted correctly. That creates an environment where a disease and illness can flourish. But Rapamycin keeps those copies crisp and legible.

[00:02:35.150] – Sam Ridgeway
What about the potential side effects? It’s the usual: lower potassium levels, decreased blood platelets, increased blood pressure, constipation, blah, blah, blah. They appear to be the standard copy-paste list of possibilities every drug manufacturer throws at us. Rapamycin is not just another drug. It’s a significant milestone in our understanding of immunology and aging. It’s the development that invites us to not only extend life, but more importantly, to enhance its quality. And while the jury is still out on the ultimate impact, one thing is clear. Rapamycin has opened a new frontier in medicine, and we’re just getting started. So while I’m not advocating its use in others, I’m simply being transparent about what I’m taking and why. Because getting older is inevitable, but feeling old and looking old, that’s a choice.